Looking for Feedback: Endeavor-Class Battlecrusier

[xenoscepter (OP)]

I've only been playing for about two / three days.        This is the Warship I feel I've done my best on, how do you all think I did?

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Endeavor class Battlecruiser    16,250 tons     178 Crew     1007.75 BP      TCS 325  TH 375  EM 0
1153 km/s     Armour 8-57     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 13     PPV 12
Maint Life 7.23 Years     MSP 5116    AFR 704%    IFR 9.8%    1YR 172    5YR 2573    Max Repair 31.25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 36 months    Spare Berths 3   

StarTech Systems Model A (3)    Power 125    Fuel Use 8.84%    Signature 125    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 990,000 Litres    Range 124.0 billion km   (1244 days at full power)

Triton Project "Zeus" 15cm Laser Cannon (1)    Range 40,000km     TS: 1250 km/s     Power 6-0.25     RM 1    ROF 120        6 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Federal-Colonial Military Laser 10cm (3)    Range 40,000km     TS: 1250 km/s     Power 3-1     RM 2    ROF 15        3 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Westinghouse TP-20K/2.5kms "Fast-Trax" FCS (1)    Max Range: 40,000 km   TS: 2500 km/s     75 50 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Winchester Strix Beam FCS (4)    Max Range: 10,000 km   TS: 1875 km/s     0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Class-2 Military Reactor (2)     Total Power Output 4    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Class-1 Military Reactor (2)     Total Power Output 2    Armour 0    Exp 5%

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes


Any feedback is good.   Bear in mind this is made in a Trans-Newtonian Start with Nuclear-Thermal Engines, Water-Pressure Reactors, 12cm Lasers, 0.   75 Laser Weight Reduction, Visible Light Lasers, Fuel Storage (Large), and Damage Control as the only Techs Researched besides the components themselves.  This ship is armored with basic Duranium as well.

[Panopticon]

My first reaction is wow that is a lot of maintenance and cruising range, is this thing really intended for deployments multiple jumps away from home and to be left alone for three years? Even if it is your maintenance is still more than double your intended deployment time so you might be able to save a bit of weight there.

Also I don't see any active sensors, so unless this guy is accompanied by another ship then it ain't gonna be able to actually see anything to shoot.

[Michael Sandy]

Early ships in a TN start are usually crappy.  You don't have boosted engine tech, so your ships are really slow.  And if you have shipyards tooled to those early ships, it is REALLY time consuming to retool them.

After several painful Conventional starts, I learned to start off with 1,000 ton shipyards, because they are SO much faster to retool.

The ratio of weapon mass to the rest of the ship seems a bit low.  And you don't have turrets, or a x4 accuracy fire control, so you don't have a way to engage missiles.  Its utility to a later fleet is sadly going to be how many missiles its hull can absorb before blowing up.  An ugly way to win, still a way to win, but... ow?

[Michael Sandy]

A ship that had turreted lasers, and a LOT of them, at least could be used as an anti-missile flak barge, which would give them a longer career of utility.

Another minor issue, you appear to have way more power than your weapons need.  You only have capacitor 1, so your weapons only draw 1 power per 5 second turn.

[sublight]

The ship doesn't punch hard enough to be a jump point guardian, doesn't have enough active missile defense to defend a colony, and doesn't have enough weapons to provide an impressive looking PPV (planetary protection value) to the dumb colonists. Also with no active scanner it can't operate independently.

You can safely dump fuel and/or switch to less efficient engines. If you need to assault an alien system you can use tanker escorts, and for Sol/local operation you should be fine with <20 billion km range. Likewise for local defense you can cut deployment time and maintenance life in half and either leave them stationed at Earth or rotate them back for maintenance more frequently.

You can dump at least three of the Strix Beam FCs. Typically every FC controls 2-10 weapons so with the current weapon load out it is only useful as an emergency backup for the Westinghouse.

You should either end up with a smaller cheaper ship... or fill the freed space back up with more weapons and maybe a resolution-1 active scanner.

[Steve Walmsley]

BTW it is hard to create an effective beam warship at first try so don't disheartened by the above feedback. It is intended to be helpful, not critical.

You will learn from experience as well. Seeing what works in combat against different types of threat is probably the best teacher.

[Father Tim]

I think it's a great ship, and very similar to the sort of thing my empires build when just barely staggering into space.  I completely disagree with almost everyone above (except Steve).  I think all of them build foolishly short-ranged (fuel-wise) ships with razor-thin maintenance margins and nowhere near enough deployment time.  I'm pleased to see someone else building ships I consider 'reasonable'.

(Though honesty compels me to note that my ship design philosophy is guided largely by (A) what historical precedent would be fun to duplicate in Aurora and (B) the theory that 90% of the time Aurora space battles are going to be deteremined by how many of what type of which tech level of ships show up, so I might as well have fun dying gloriously for the empire when my lone cruiser encounters an enemy battlefleet and promptly gets annihilated.)

The things I would do differently, if that were my ship, would be to not use reduced-size tech for the laser, as I find the reduced Rate of Fire is more of a hindrance than the extra weight, and to have only two Beam Fire Controls -- one specially-matched to each size of laser.  The number of times a ship like this would need to shoot at four separate targets simultaneously is practically nil.

At such a low tech level as yours, I prefer to have a single size of Power Reactor for my fleet.  As a personal preference, I only build reactors large enough to have at least one Hit-to-Kill, as I really, REALLY hate having 0 HTK systems (since they blow up, but don't 'absorb' any damage, a ship can lose a LOT of functionality to a single point of damage.)  As Michael Sandy pointed out, your weapons only require 4 power per 'turn' (i.e. 5 seconds), and your ship generates 12.  That's probably more redundancy than you need, so you can safely drop to two Class 2s or three Class 1s.

As Panopticon pointed out, this ship has no active sensors and therefore will need some other vessel (or planetary sensors) to spot targets for it.  This is not necessarily a problem, just something to be aware of.  (On the other hand, it's easy enough to fit a 50 ton/1 Hull Space active sensor onto it.  Beam-armed ships don't need a lot of range to spot their targets, although somebody needs to be able to search the system for enemy fleets.)

I look forward to seeing the Endeavour Mk II Battlecruiser. . . perhaps called the Morse Class (a British TV joke).

. . .

P.S.:  If you read Kurt's "Corporate Federation" fiction, you'll see a lot of techniques for making a more efficient and combat-capable fleet.  Game-efficient, that is.  Personally, (and with absolutely no disrespect intended to Kurt) I find the paradigm of:
  1.  Spot the Enemy before they spot you
  2.  Fire a load of missiles at them
  3.  Watch them blow up
  --  (Repeat steps 2 and 3 as necessary)
  4.  Fly home to rearm, refuel, repair, rest, refit, etc. before the next fight
to be a very boring way to play Aurora.  I would rather sail my battle fleets at the enemy, all guns blazing, and have half of them blow up every fight.

[Michael Sandy]

There is a philosophy of not armoring early warships on the grounds that low tech weapons have almost as much HtK per BP as armor, and armor is so bulky before you get better armor tech.

There are ship designs with really small amounts of Research Points that can have a long career.  A carrier built with Boat Bay tech (1000 RP) and extra Maintenance Storage (1000 RP) can provide a forward base on a populated colony that can sustain a patrol for a long time.

A railgun flak barge, which uses basic railguns, and doesn't even have enough power to fire the railguns at ROF 15 can be a cheap way to provide PPV and mitigate box launcher volleys.

Some ship roles go obsolete MUCH faster than others.  Offensive beam ships go obsolete the fastest, in my opinion.  A ship concept that depends on being faster and outranging the enemy is very vulnerable to upgraded enemies making it useless.  Point defense ships go obsolete the slowest, because where slower and shorter ranged beam ships are nothing but targets, a point defense ship that is only 50% effective as a subsequent generation is still useful if you have enough of them.

[Kurt]

I think it's a great ship, and very similar to the sort of thing my empires build when just barely staggering into space.  I completely disagree with almost everyone above (except Steve).  I think all of them build foolishly short-ranged (fuel-wise) ships with razor-thin maintenance margins and nowhere near enough deployment time.  I'm pleased to see someone else building ships I consider 'reasonable'.

(Though honesty compels me to note that my ship design philosophy is guided largely by (A) what historical precedent would be fun to duplicate in Aurora and (B) the theory that 90% of the time Aurora space battles are going to be deteremined by how many of what type of which tech level of ships show up, so I might as well have fun dying gloriously for the empire when my lone cruiser encounters an enemy battlefleet and promptly gets annihilated.)

The things I would do differently, if that were my ship, would be to not use reduced-size tech for the laser, as I find the reduced Rate of Fire is more of a hindrance than the extra weight, and to have only two Beam Fire Controls -- one specially-matched to each size of laser.  The number of times a ship like this would need to shoot at four separate targets simultaneously is practically nil.

At such a low tech level as yours, I prefer to have a single size of Power Reactor for my fleet.  As a personal preference, I only build reactors large enough to have at least one Hit-to-Kill, as I really, REALLY hate having 0 HTK systems (since they blow up, but don't 'absorb' any damage, a ship can lose a LOT of functionality to a single point of damage.)  As Michael Sandy pointed out, your weapons only require 4 power per 'turn' (i.e. 5 seconds), and your ship generates 12.  That's probably more redundancy than you need, so you can safely drop to two Class 2s or three Class 1s.

As Panopticon pointed out, this ship has no active sensors and therefore will need some other vessel (or planetary sensors) to spot targets for it.  This is not necessarily a problem, just something to be aware of.  (On the other hand, it's easy enough to fit a 50 ton/1 Hull Space active sensor onto it.  Beam-armed ships don't need a lot of range to spot their targets, although somebody needs to be able to search the system for enemy fleets.)

I look forward to seeing the Endeavour Mk II Battlecruiser. . . perhaps called the Morse Class (a British TV joke).

. . .

P.S.:  If you read Kurt's "Corporate Federation" fiction, you'll see a lot of techniques for making a more efficient and combat-capable fleet.  Game-efficient, that is.  Personally, (and with absolutely no disrespect intended to Kurt) I find the paradigm of:
  1.  Spot the Enemy before they spot you
  2.  Fire a load of missiles at them
  3.  Watch them blow up
  --  (Repeat steps 2 and 3 as necessary)
  4.  Fly home to rearm, refuel, repair, rest, refit, etc. before the next fight
to be a very boring way to play Aurora.  I would rather sail my battle fleets at the enemy, all guns blazing, and have half of them blow up every fight.

I understand exactly what you mean.  The tactics and strategies I am using in the campaign are useful only against NPR's.  If I was playing against other human controlled empires, even if that human is me <G>, I wouldn't be able to get away with most of the things I've done.  And the battles would be a little bit less repetitious and maybe a little bit more interesting. 

Kurt

[Gabethebaldandbold]

you just made me realize I have no idea how to evaluate a early game ship. but in my opinion, missiles are easier on this game, because so long as your missiles are good, your fleet is good, and if you upgrade your missiles, your fleet is basically up to date, and things are much easier to "futureproof". beams are easier to put on fighters, because you can always scrap them and make more really quickly, and an outdated carrier is almost never a problem combat-wise.

but battleships and battlecruisers are very fun. dont minmax the fun out of this game.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Allot of good insights in this thread...

Since I do allot of conventional starts I  build allot of early ship designs. The "problems" that I face is that ships of this size is nearly impossible to sustain at this technology level. You rarely have the economical or scientific strength to support them. Just research and build a jump ship to support such a large ship will be very expensive.

When it comes to a ships range, maintenance and such this have to be completely based on what role the ship serve. How far from the home base is it suppose to operate and how long to you expect their missions to take. Again at these technology levels you are probably not going to operate very far from your home system with any military vessels in general, you simply don't have the economy for that.

It is also completely impossible to analyse how good a particular weapon system is in isolation so in my opinion you can't really value how useful they are. However I might agree that pure beam warships should not be extreme long range cruiser like vessels, you need a beam ships to be relatively fast and/or have decently long range weapons. Really good beam warships tend to have low mission range unless you have a considerable technological advantage over your enemy.

I usually keep combat warships in the range of 6-12 month deployment range, that is quite realistic for a human crews. More than this I usually only give to science and/or intelligence gathering vessels.

When it comes to Maintenance there are two things I look at. Having at least two times the MSP versus max repair and having a maintenance cycle of roughly 2-3 times the deployment range.

I always consider the exact reason for building and designing a specific ship and how I intend to potentially upgrade it in the future. How many ships do I think I will need to fulfill it's duties and how will that impact my economy going forward. It is also important to figure out how components on this ship can be used in other ship designs. It is often more efficient in the long run to make some compromises in competent design if you can use them successfully in other designs as well. If every ship needs specifically designed component your general research will become severely hampered.

My general advice is to build a fleet of much smaller ships at this general tech level and then dynamically increase the size of future generation ships and upgrade your earlier ships as second class escort vessels, eventually you scrap them for resources. In general you will not need excessive range on early ships, often not more than 5-15 million km. You should instead have some auxiliary ships brought along with more fuel, supplies and ammunition. Jump ships are good as auxiliary tankers for example.

I also think that you need to have at least some active scanner on any ship with a weapon system. A beam ship should have at least a small resolution 1 active scanner, it does not have to be large, just large enough to see incoming missiles at a 10 second range (roughly).